Quotes Regarding the Nature of Human Freedom
Quotes regarding the dominant understanding of our culture, which denies there is an objective human nature. The dominant belief today is that freedom and fulfillment is found by determining our own reality and nature and embracing our desires, whatever they may be.
At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. – Justice Kennedy, Planned Parenthood vs. Casey
We are not a culture that never understood what a human being was in his nature and in his destiny. Rather we are a culture that, having once known these things, has decided against living them or understanding them. Indeed, we have decided to reject most of them, almost as an act of defiance—as an act of pure humanism—as if what we are is not first given to us. – James V. Schall, foreword to Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, 9
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence…
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. – William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Blake is arguing for freedom through embracing any desire we might have, and that limiting our choices or resisting desires we think are wrong is destructive of finding and expressing our authentic self).
The common modern understanding of freedom begins by denying any ultimate ends for human well being beyond ‘choosing’ itself. Freedom in this modern view is freedom from any restrictions on choosing – including any restrictions derived from human nature, from the demands of justice, from the good that exists prior to the human will. Ken Myers, The Mars Hill Audio Journal
Quotes from 20th-century dystopian novels, which predicted where our culture was heading, and how the new dominant ideas required rejecting the traditional understanding of truth, creation, human nature and freedom.
Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. ‘If I wished,’ O’Brien had said, ‘I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.’ Winston worked it out. ‘If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.’ Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: ‘It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.’ He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a ‘real’ world where ‘real’ things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens…. He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions — ‘the Party says the earth is flat’, ‘the party says that ice is heavier than water’ — and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed great powers of reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as ‘two and two make five’ were beyond his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain. – George Orwell, 1984
We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. – George Orwell, 1984
We are not our own, any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves; we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We cannot be our own masters. We are God’s property by creation, by redemption, by regeneration. He has a triple claim upon us. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness, or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way,—to depend on no one,—to have to think of nothing out of sight,—to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man—that it is an unnatural state—may do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end. No, we are creatures; and, as being such, we have two duties, to be resigned and to be thankful. – Cardinal Newman, quoted in Brave New World (Chapter 17). (In this quote, a government leader is reasoning with ‘The Savage’ – who ironically is far more educated and has more understanding of human nature than the civilized people of the novel. The quote is meant to show the older view of reality and human nature – which has been utterly rejected in the brave new world.)
God made creation is such a way that no matter what we proclaim, there is objective reality which will ultimately require humanity to submit to its inherent limits and restrictions – which leads to true freedom and flourishing
If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into a world of facts, you step into a world of limits – G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Because a fish absorbs oxygen from water, not air, it is free only if it is restricted to water. If a fish is ‘freed’ from the river and put out on the grass to explore, its freedom to move and soon live is destroyed. Real freedom is finding the right restrictions. – Tim Keller, The Reason for God
In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions. Those that fit with the reality of our nature and the world produce greater power and scope for our abilities and a deeper joy and fulfillment. Experimentation, risk, and making mistakes bring growth only if, over time, they show us our limits as well as our abilities. If we only grow intellectually, vocationally, and physically through judicious constraints–why would it not also be true for spiritual and moral growth? Instead of insisting on freedom to create spiritual reality, shouldn’t we be seeking to discover it and disciplining ourselves to live according to it?” ― Timothy Keller, The Reason for God
It has become something of a commonplace among scholars to note that—from at least the time of Plato through the high Middle Ages—the Western understanding of human freedom was inseparable from an understanding of human nature: to be free was to be able to flourish as the kind of being one was… To choose awry, then—through ignorance or maleficence or corrupt longing—was not considered a manifestation of freedom, but of slavery to the imperfect, the deficient, the privative, the (literally) subhuman. Liberty of choice was only the possibility of freedom, not its realization. – David B Hart “The Pornography Culture” in The New Atlantis (Summer 2004).
The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free – Igor Stravinsky
The following article describes a study demonstrating that children actually enjoy more freedom when there are fences around the playground. Such boundaries actually encourage freedom and exploration rather than inhibiting it.
https://www.asla.org/awards/2006/studentawards/282.html
A team of landscape architects conducted a simple study to observe any physical and psychological influences of having a fence around a playground, and how its consequent effects would impact preschool children. By observing teachers and their students on a playground surrounded by a fence, and on a comparable playground with no fence, the researchers found a striking difference in how the children interacted in the space. On playgrounds without fences, the children tended to gather around the teacher, and were reluctant to stray far from her view. On playgrounds that were fenced in, however, they ran all around the entire playground, feeling more free to explore. The researchers concluded that with a boundary, in this case a fence, children felt more at ease to explore the space.